NDLI: Surveillance and class in Big Brother

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Surveillance and class in Big Brother

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Wayne, Mike
Copyright Year	2011
Abstract	The television series Big Brother, for which Channel Four has contracted the rights until 2006, is in fact rather more than a television programme. It is better understood as an evolving multimedia, multiplatform technological experiment, trailblazing free terrestrial television into the brave new world of what Dan Schiller calls digital capitalism.1 The political economy of Big Brother is inseparable from larger institutional and economic trends which have seen huge capital investments in new communication and information technology. Along with the economics of Big Brother, as a text, the series is also a cultural mediation of leading developments within capitalism, particularly the increasing importance of surveillance and the capacities it gives elites for further social control and manipulation. Precisely how we conceptualize the relations between different levels of the social – the cultural and the economic in particular – has been the central problematic of the base–superstructure model in Marxism. I want to offer an ʻunpackingʼ of that model in the course of a materialist analysis of the techno-spectacle. In doing so, I will clarify, via a critique of Althusser s̓ notion of overdetermination, the meaning and importance of the concept of mediation. I will also draw on some concepts developed for textual exegesis by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious, integrating them into some of the political economic mediations Jameson is often criticized for neglecting.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://mikewayne.info/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/big-brother-RP.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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